


How Love Grows

by Serpentine



Category: Last Unicorn - All Media Types, Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle
Genre: F/M, Gen, HC Bingo, prompt: love spell gone wrong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-28 15:45:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/309456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serpentine/pseuds/Serpentine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Schmendrick keeps dreaming of the Tree, but he doesn't understand why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How Love Grows

_There is no immortality but a tree's love. I will keep the colour of your eyes when no other in the world remembers your name._

 _We will perish together!_

Gasping, Schmendrick awoke beneath a blanket of stars with the Tree's words ringing within him like an iron funeral bell. One flailing arm struck Molly's shoulder, and she rolled away and sat up.

Schmendrick clutched his thin travelling cloak around himself and waited for the world to resolve itself into his rightful present-day (or rather, night) circumstances. Wizards had an awareness of the world so constant and so detailed that they could navigate an unknown forest blindfolded; one some level, Schmendrick knew that he was lying in a lilac grove beside Molly Grue on a gently sloping hill two days' ride from the edge of Haggard's kingdom, with the spring stars overhead and the thin clouds streaming away toward the north high against the moon on the spring-bearing wind. All that made a wizard of a man, after all, was a well of power within that was linked to the power of the world around him, and Schmendrick had -- at last -- shattered the cover on that well, allowing its power to touch that of the world's.

Why, then, had he woken two nights in a row dreaming of a Tree's embrace, the aftermath of his own bungled spell? Why was he waking with terror asurge in his blood, born of the wild elation of having touched true magic and the bodily panic of asphyxiation? It had felt so real, in his dream. Real enough to throw him out of his sleep grasping with mind and hands for what _should_ be there, his rough cloak and solid ground and more breathing room than any castle held.

"Well," came Molly Grue's voice, "I see you've not ever learned the first thing about sleeping with women." The concern in her voice might be audible only to him; it quivered in the air like silver threads drawn between the two of them, plain as day.

It just so happened her words were accurate, and that prevented him from making a saucy retort. That left him, instead, with her concern and his nightmare to choose from when he spoke.

"It was the Tree," he said at last. She shifted toward him and tucked her own cloak around them both.

"The one you bespelled? Who fell in love with you?" He'd told her about it, in the first elation of having both his magic and her company; they'd sat up all night swapping stories of the -- _their_ \-- unicorn, knowing she would leave them soon.

"Yes. I don't know why it keeps coming back to me. It's so vivid..." Without quite meaning to, he pressed his shoulder more tightly against hers. "It was the first time I touched true magic without her with me," he said more quietly.

Since her departure, the unicorn was strictly a pronoun shared between them, and shared only infrequently at that.

"She rescued you," Molly said. "You told me about it, how the ropes fell away at a touch, and how magic shone all about her like a halo. I wish I had seen it." In the words he saw Molly's own regrets, dark shapes like fish flitting beneath the surface. The largest was that she had only seen the unicorn's magic mingled with sorrow, restoring Lir's life on an overflowing shore; the others, smaller, were echoes of time wasted with Cully, shame in banditry, the newness of Schmendrick's presence now.

"Yes," he said again. "But I don't know why I must relive it every night. It was a small incident in an epic quest, really. Juggling teacups for Haggard upset me more, at the time. Why is my unconscious mind so bound to a tree I briefly enchanted before my great quest had half begun?"

He expected Molly to be quiet, or perhaps to mock him in silvery concern about his juggling.

"She loved you," she said. "Poorly, to be sure," she added with a sideways glance at him, "and not by your intent, though certainly by your _effort._ " -- And there was the laugh he had expected. She grew sober again, though, and went on, "As you say, it was your first magic without _her_. The first time your magic broke free to touch something else. Maybe," her voice had grown low as she thought, but now it strengthened. "Maybe it was because she wasn't with you. You loved her, even then. Maybe your magic _felt_ that, or saw that, or whatever a wizard's power does with things that aren't tangible, when it came rushing through some crack in your self." _And now she's gone; it's only natural you would cling to any vestige of her that you can._ Molly didn't speak that part aloud, for it touched too harshly on their shared grief, but Schmendrick heard anyway.

Silence reigned for an indeterminate span, and then without warning Schmendrick swept Molly over sideways and kissed her. It was a warm kiss, an eager and admiring kiss, and wholly unexpected, but she rose to the occasion anyway before pushing him off.

"Well, great wizard, have I taught you something about magic?"

"More than that," Schmendrick said, and felt Molly Grue's presence and love all around him like a second cloak. A very prosaic and human cloak, that couldn't repair the hole a unicorn had made in him, but would nonetheless cover the wound against further damage.

"Far more than that," Schmendrick repeated. "You've taught me that a genuine love will release me."


End file.
